NEW! ⚡NOW LbE Reporting
The new ⚡|NOW reporting allows a user to view work from the standard that is of a similar standard to their own, as well as work that is of a quality that is a little higher and a little lower.
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Newsletter October 2026
Despite being only a few weeks since our last Newsletter, we have plenty to share in this update, the highlight being the extension of RM Compare | ⚡NOW onto non-mobile devices.
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Stripping Back to the Song: Why RM Compare | ⚡NOW Does Less, on Purpose
When you build a mobile experience for comparative judgement, the temptation is to start with the desktop application and ask: how can we fit everything onto a smaller screen? With RM Compare |⚡NOW, we asked a different question: what does someone need to make a useful comparison, right now?
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New! RM Compare | ⚡NOW - now available on any device
Hot on the heels of the 'mobile first' release of RM Compare | ⚡NOW. we are pleased to make it accessible on any* device.
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Assessing Big Ideas: Why ACJ Belongs with UbD
UbD (Understanding by Design®) encourages teachers to design authentic performance tasks: essays, presentations, podcasts, investigations, portfolios, prototypes, and other complex responses that make big ideas visible. But when that work has to be judged, the system often falls back on tools and habits better suited to narrower, more standardised forms of assessment.
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From Medieval Guilds to AI: How Guild Knowledge is Becoming the Missing Piece for Modern Learning
Walk into a medieval guildhall and a modern AI lab and, on the surface, they could not be more different. One smells of timber, leather and metal; the other of coffee and electronics. Yet both are wrestling with the same underlying question: how does a community grow and protect its shared sense of what “good” looks like – and keep that sense of quality alive when everything around it is changing?
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For 500 years, Guilds were how expertise worked. Then we forgot. Now we're remembering.
The craft guilds of medieval Europe such as goldsmiths, weavers, stonemasons and apothecaries are often remembered as protectionist trade associations. That reputation is not entirely undeserved. But it obscures something more important: they were the most sophisticated knowledge transmission institutions the pre-modern world produced.
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New! RM Compare|⚡NOW (ALPHA) - New features
We continue to push forward with our work in ➿RM Compare|⚡NOW, driven largely by user feedback. What to know more and take part? Get in touch. We have introduced a new Catalogue feature. In addition there is new Guild Knowledge functionality.
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VAR, Kayfabe and Why Assessment can Feel Fake
Rick Rubin once said that professional wrestling is “real” and everything else is fake. Wrestling is honest about its kayfabe – the shared pretence that what you’re watching is a contest, even though everyone involved knows it’s scripted. The fiction is part of the product.
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Curriculum change, AI and the race for 'Guild Knowledge'
Across most established curricula, something important already exists but is rarely named. Over time, teachers, examiners, parents and students have built a shared intuition for what “good” looks like: what a strong essay feels like, what a secure piece of maths work looks like, what “ready for the next stage” means in a subject. That shared intuition is what we have been calling Guild Knowledge.
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Why 'Guild Knowledge' is your organisation's most valuable, and most overlooked asset
In the previous posts, we explored what Guild Knowledge is (the tacit, experience‑based ability to recognise quality) and showed what the research says about how it can be developed through Learning by Evaluating. This post makes the organisational case: what happens when Guild Knowledge is absent, why conventional responses make it worse, and how to build it deliberately and at scale.
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The research behind Learning by Evaluating: Why RM Compare|📳Live works
In the last post, we introduced Assessment as Learning and the idea of Guild Knowledge - the tacit, experience‑based ability to recognise quality that experts build over time. RM Compare | ⏱️NOW gives people a short, structured way to test and develop that ability by estimating quality, making comparisons, and seeing how accurate their judgement is.
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RM Compare | ⚡NOW and Assessment as Learning: Building 'Guild Knowledge'
RM Compare | ⚡NOW isn't just a convenient demo or a quick assessment tool. It's a practical example of Assessment as Learning - a pedagogical approach that helps people develop what's called Guild Knowledge.